LITMIR.BIZ

      4

      How gentle the ocean was tonight, with hardly a wave to break its smooth, swelling surface; and how bright the moon, splintered into a thousand, a million tiny silver fragments that danced along the gentle swells. A magical, enchanted night with the moon a fairy godmother who could turn every hidden, secret wish into reality for just a few precious hours. Alexa knew that Harriet would have frowned and told her that she should think rationally. Learn to be more practical. But how she hated that word! Ah, tonight was meant only for fantasy…was only a fantasy, perhaps, as she felt herself caught up in a silver-spangled web that transported her into a magical place where wishes came true and anything was possible if you closed your eyes and believed hard enough.

      Almost mesmerized into believing she could disappear into the silver eye of the moon as she stared into it, Alexa found herself remembering the fairy tales that Mama used to read to her when she was very young and Freddy hadn’t even been born yet. Stories of handsome Princes, and Princesses with long golden hair that could be let down castle walls. Of dragons that could spit fire, and tall giants and twisted gnomes. Enchanted forests and bramble bushes that could grow in the twinkling of an eye to shut in a sleeping beauty who could only be awakened from her slumbers by a kiss. “Stuff and nonsense!” Aunt Harry used to scold. “The child’s head shouldn’t be filled with fantasies and falsehoods that have nothing to do with real life!” But what was wrong with escaping from real life sometimes into the magic world of fantasy where anything was possible? To imagine herself the fairy princess held captive by the spell of the wicked magician—waiting, wrapped about in her silver-webbed sleep for the Prince who was destined to rescue her. Or a pagan sacrifice like Andromeda, waiting for her Perseus. Waiting, like a moon-silvered statue, for…it did not matter. She felt herself flow into the moon and felt the moon flow into her, and she was magic and part of the night itself that was the birthday gift of her fairy godmother. A gift of magic…

      Still floating languidly, Alexa suddenly felt a different, almost agitated motion of the water beneath her. A sudden wave that had managed to force its way in through the tiny entrance to this miniature bay? A splash…? No, her own moon-fevered imagination. What had she expected, a sea monster? She should not have let herself stare so hard at the moon that she became altogether lost in the fantasies her imagination surrounded her with. There was no one, and nothing here but poor sleeping Menika and herself. Annoyed at herself, Alexa closed her eyes for an instant against the silver brightness that seemed reflected everywhere, and began to tread water while she pushed annoying strands of wet, clinging hair from her eyes. So much for fantasy!

      And then, on the very heels of that particular thought Alexa almost felt her heart stop as she felt something touch her. Seaweed? Then the strangest sensation of having her skin stroked underwater, all the way up from her calves to the length of her thighs. Not a shark? No, only some large fish that had somehow managed to find its way in here through the narrow opening that separated this pleasant little pool from the sea beyond it? Suddenly frozen and losing all power of motion for some seconds Alexa felt herself sink under water, to come up gasping and spluttering and blinded momentarily again by her water-logged hair, which clung to her face and neck like choking strands of seaweed. Helplessly, and unbelievingly, she could feel herself being moved backward in the water until her back scraped uncomfortably against a rocky-surface—one of the “steps” hewn into the rock here on the land side of the pool. She was still quite incapable of speech, having accidentally allowed herself to swallow a considerable amount of salty water, and barely capable of thought either until she heard an unmistakably human voice that held an annoying undercurrent of amusement.

      “Well, well! I seem to have caught myself a mermaid! Or is it a sea witch? One of old Neptune’s wicked daughters?”

      It was also, Alexa realized belatedly, unmistakably a pair of human hands that held her hard, and far too familiarly about the waist at this moment. And if only she was not still choking and coughing in a most unladylike way she would have used some of the barracks slang she had picked up from some of the young officers who sometimes forgot that she was a female. Oh damn, damn, she thought; why did her damned hair always have to get in the bloody way? How often she had longed to be able to crop it off! She shook her head fiercely, pushing heavy tangles back from her temples, and found herself looking into a face that was far too close to hers—a face she could hardly see, because the moon was at his back.

      Alexa had not, until tonight, ever really believed in superstition or ancient legends; but now without her willing or her wanting, the sudden memory of her earlier fantasy thoughts raced through her mind. A man (and she knew instinctively that he was as naked as she was) who had risen out of the sea—or so it seemed. Had she managed, by some impossible accident, to conjure up some dark spirit from the ocean depths? Poseidon? No, Lucifer himself—no fairy prince! She could only see him as an outline against moon-bright sky and water…archetypal man, as pagan and primitive as the night itself. Alexa felt spellbound; and she had never known the meaning of that word until now. As

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